No coding background. No development team. No custom software budget. Just a clear picture of what the firm needed, an AI coding tool, and a willingness to iterate.
A firm owner in the Small Business Accountants and Advisers Brain Trust recently posted a list of internal tools he had built using Claude Code.
The response was immediate. Dozens of comments. Dozens of practitioners describing what they had built themselves. Problems solved. Workflows automated. Tools that did not exist in any vendor catalogue but now run inside working accounting firms across Australia.
The volume of that response is worth sitting with. This is not a fringe experiment.
The Problem That Started It
The firm runs on Karbon. Karbon does what it does well. But the reporting and visibility layer the firm actually needed was absent: staff billings versus targets, live revenue tracking, capacity planning by team, workflow status across the whole operation without someone manually updating a spreadsheet.
Every firm owner knows that feeling. The tool looks right in the demo. Three months later, something is always slightly off. The reports pull the wrong data. The integration drops. The vendor roadmap does not line up with what the firm needs right now.
So rather than wait for an update that may or may not arrive, he built it himself.
What He Vibe Coded
The starting point was an internal analytics app connected directly to Karbon. It pulls live data across billing, targets, revenue, and workflow status for every team. Capacity planning became a conversation grounded in actual numbers rather than estimates and spreadsheet memory.
From there, the Karbon sync was automated entirely. Work items, timesheets, and estimates now refresh every fifteen minutes without anyone touching a button. That alone removed a category of administrative overhead that had been quietly consuming hours each week.
The BAS workflow app required the most iteration. It is a step-by-step preparation tool for staff, with AI flagging unusual transactions and Div 7A issues, a direct ATO link, and per-client lodgement status tracking. Getting the intelligence layer right took back-and-forth. Getting AI to flag the right things, in the right context, without generating noise that staff learn to ignore, is a harder problem than it first appears. The tool now works, and it has materially changed how the team approaches BAS season.
A trust minutes generator followed. Clients answer a short set of questions. A draft minutes document comes out the other side, ready for review. The time previously spent on that task is gone.
Document automation now handles BAS summary letters, tax return cover letters, and confirmation of income letters. Staff fill in a form, a branded PDF or Word document is produced, and it goes via PandaDoc for e-signing. What used to involve multiple manual steps and formatting decisions now takes minutes.
Internal tax planning software is in progress.
What Others Are Building
When the original post went up, the response confirmed this is happening across the profession at scale.
Practitioners described an ABR integration for checking GST registrations and ABNs in real time. A bill checker connected to trust accounting software. A PDF to QIF converter. A reconciliation checker. A Karbon timesheet export feeding an employee performance dashboard. A client profitability dashboard. A payroll processing tool that reformats timesheet data from clients directly into Xero payroll format. An AP reconciliation tool matching Xero aged payables to supplier statements. A proposal generator built from scratch because no existing proposal software did exactly what was needed. An entity structure chart generator. An ATO mail redaction and renaming workflow.
One practitioner described combining downloaded PDF activity statements with stored blank payment slips, automatically updating the payment slip with the correct figure and applying a stored password. Small. Specific. Solved.
None of these firms described having dedicated development teams. Sole practitioners and small firm owners identifying a friction point and removing it.
A Word on Security
It would be incomplete to cover this without acknowledging the questions it raises.
Several practitioners in the original thread raised data security directly. When custom tools connect to live client data in Karbon and Xero, where that data sits, how it is handled, and what protections are in place are legitimate questions without a single answer. They depend on how each tool is built, where it is hosted, what data it accesses, and how access is managed.
Any firm going down this path needs to think carefully about those considerations before connecting live client data to anything they have built. That is a reason to build carefully, not a reason to avoid building.
What This Means for Firms
The barrier is lower than most firm owners expect. Claude Code handles integrations with Xero, Karbon, and other platforms directly. The limiting factor is identifying the right problem to start with and being willing to iterate when the first version does not work.
The consistent advice from practitioners who have been doing this: start with whatever costs the team the most time each week. Not the most interesting problem. Not the most technically exciting one. The most expensive one.
The profession has spent years waiting for software vendors to solve problems that have been on firm owners' lists for a long time. A growing number of firm owners have stopped waiting.
So here is the question: what is the one workflow in your firm that you have been quietly tolerating for too long?
